'She's worth every penny': £185,000 cost of Queen's visit revealed

A little more than £185,000 was spent hosting last year's royal visit to mark the start of The Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebration, it has emerged.

The costs to Leicester City Council and De Montfort University of welcoming the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duchess of Cambridge to the city in March were revealed in Freedom of Information requests, submitted by campaign group Republic.

The Queen chose the city to start her nationwide tour celebrating 60 years on the throne and sent a message of thanks to the people of Leicestershire, who turned out in their thousands to see her.

Republic has criticised the £85,851 expense of the visit met by the council and the £100,000 spent by the publicly-funded university.

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However, city mayor Sir Peter Soulsby and the university both said it was money well spent because of the high profile of the visit.

Sir Peter, who on the day received the royal party in front of thousands of people in a crowded Humberstone Gate, said: "It's great value for money. So many thousands of people from Leicestershire came to the city to enjoy the visit and they had the most wonderful day.

"It was a great honour for the city to be chosen by the Queen to start her jubilee tour. The cost was a small price to pay for having the honour of being the first place on the jubilee tour."

A city council spokesman said: "The scale of this visit, and the public interest it had generated, meant the crowd safety and security requirements were considerable.

"We took on-going advice from the police and the royal household.

"In the end, costs associated with road closures, barriers, security, crowd safety and associated staffing accounted for over £65,000 of the total costs to the council.

"It was a special moment in the city's history and a unique opportunity for us to show our strengths as a proud, diverse and modern city."

De Montfort University, which hosted the royal party for part of the visit, was yesterday unable to say what it had spent the £100,000 on.

In its Freedom of Information response it revealed the £10,000 had come from external sponsorship.

A university spokesman said: "We believe the money spent on hosting the visit was money well spent on a historic day for our students, staff and for the city.

"We also believe the visit will generate many more thousands of pounds in income for the university from students coming here as a result of the great profile we received."

He said that in the days immediately following the visit, media coverage reached more than 779 million people and had continued to bring attention to the university since.

"That included featuring in round-up of the year features broadcast on national television."

Republic, which campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy and its replacement with an elected head of state, said the money spent on the royal visit should have been used to protect council and university jobs or improve facilities.

Spokesman Graham Smith said: "There is no value for Leicester in these royal visits yet the council and university have wasted tens of thousands of pounds that could be spent on jobs and student facilities.

"Both the council and university are facing cuts yet they still went ahead and spent thousands of pounds on a single day.

"Jobs could have been saved with this money. Instead, it was wasted on celebrating our undemocratic head of state.

"Students facing possible cuts to resources will wonder why the university is spending £90,000 on a royal visit. This is part of a national pattern – when the royals come to town local taxpayers can usually expect to be left with a hefty bill."

Leicester Cathedral also hosted the royal party and provided lunch for them. The Diocese of Leicester, which is not required to answer Freedom of Information requests, said it was unable to say what it had spent on the royal visit.

It said much of its preparations were done by volunteers.

Leicestershire Police was asked how much it spent on managing the royal visit, but yesterday was unable to provide a figure.

Comments

@ricardo32x The Royals have always paid tax, the Queen and the heir have for years. The Queen has been paying income tax from 1993, 20 years know. They have always paid council and VAT and N.I. You do not pay taxes on estates , you do not the income you produce.
We can get rid of the Royals if we wanted to, people do not want this.
And they do not take money of the poor.

Can we believe these figures? DMU spent well over £10,000 on Bacon Cobs alone the day of the visit (seriously), let alone gala dinners for senior staff in the days leading up to the visit and so on.
Thank goodness they won't be diverting all that public money and staff time again this year. Oh, hang on, they are doing it all over again for Prince Edward on 23rd January!

If you consider taking money off the poor to give to the rich so they can swan around Leicester in a Rolls-Royce, good value for money. Then i think you have got your priorities wrong.
If we had a President we could vote him/her out if we didn't like them.
If the Royals had paid taxes like everyone else, they would not have vast estates and wealth.
God save the Queen:-0)

Other than Nottingham how many of the other places the Queen visited on her Jubilee tour can we name? (There were dozens of them). How many of us have since visited, or decided to visit any of those other places the Queen visited because we saw she went there on her tour? Salford, anyone? Ebbw Vale? Walhamstowe? Why then do we suppose that the rest of the country will be flocking to Leicester and De Montfort University because of her visit here?
(And do De Montfort REALLY believe that when deciding where to spend their £9,000 a year fees to get the best education students will be swayed by the Queen spending half a day here? If so their students are less capable of rational thought than you'd hope!)

Nothing wrong with the Queen, she has done a great public service. If it was a republic we would have some tarnished politician or super rich public figure buying votes, maybe even Katie Price or Keith Chegwin :-)
A trip costs, but at least it was someone decent and we had a great event in the city. Nothing else much happens apart from some minority group dancing through the streets or the thugs of the EDL.

`costs associated with road closures, barriers, security, crowd safety and associated staffing accounted for over £65,000 of the total costs to the council.'
I think we need to know a few more details before we start complaining about decadence, squeezing the poor to feed the rich etc etc
Are we talking about additional expense or the notional cost of deploying council staff from their regular duties to royal duties'?
If it's the first, isn't it likely that the major beneficiaries will have been people like contract security staff and police officers on overtime?
If it's the second, the real cost isn't so much monetary as the delay incurred in pushing regular council work further into the future.
Yes, a lot of non-Royals will have got a very nice meal at someone else's expense but the actual costs will be lower than the headline figure and the benefits will at least have been spread around. Compare that with the hospitality dished out by - say - sporting organisations, insurance companies or most large corporations to their own executives and it fades into insignificance.